Advances in semiconductor manufacturing and circuit design technologies have enabled the development and production of integrated circuits with increasingly higher operational frequencies. In turn, electronic products and systems incorporating such integrated circuits are able to provide much greater functionality than previous generations of products. This additional functionality has generally included the processing of larger and larger amounts of data at higher and higher speeds.
Many electronic systems include two or more printed circuit boards, or similar substrates, upon which the aforementioned high-speed integrated circuits are mounted, and on and through which various signals are routed to and from these integrated circuits. In electronic systems with at least two boards, and the need to communicate information between those boards, a variety of connector and backplane architectures have been developed in order that information can flow between those boards.
Unfortunately, such connector and backplane architectures introduce a variety of impedance discontinuities into the signal path which result in a degradation of signal quality, also referred to as signal integrity. Connecting two boards by conventional means, such as signal-carrying mechanical connectors generally creates two, closely-spaced discontinuities, and this complex discontinuity requires expensive electronics to negotiate.
Degradation of signal integrity limits the ability of electronic systems to transfer data at very high rates which in turn limits the utility of such products.
What is needed are methods and apparatus for coupling discontiguous portions of very high data rate signal paths without the cost and power consumption associated with physical connectors and equalization circuits.